The Literature of
Orkney and Shetland

Yvonne Gray11 Sept 2013

I found the poem you’ve chosen and in the first stanza there are these reminders of the things I’d been thinking about – the shifting, will o’ the wisp nature of language, the powerful need to catch and set it down in a way that embodies the truth of whatever it is you are writing, the mystery of letters/words/signs on a page or stone – or in sand like in one of Alec Finlay’s recent projects – and their potency to draw out or convey meaning.

Language unstable as sand, but poets
Strike on hard rock, carving
Rune and hieroglyph, to celebrate
Breath’s sweet brevity.

I’ve also been thinking about your question about today’s island writing and poetry and whether it continues in the tradition in which George Mackay Brown is such a potent, resonant voice, or whether it represents Orkney very differently. It’s quite a hard question to answer – I’ve been thinking about it for a long time, and the more I think about it, the more I wonder if it does both. Occasionally, people have remarked that they’ve heard echoes of George Mackay Brown’s work in some of my poems and a couple of times other writers have been quite critical of that – which has really made me think about it. There are two poems I’ve written where I know I made quite deliberate allusions to his work but other than that, I’ve never consciously tried to imitate anything he has written or to align my view of Orkney with his. But that thought of being unduly influenced by his work and perhaps not really having found my own voice has worried me – it’s not something I can dismiss lightly.

I do think, though, that if you live in a particular place it’s natural to draw on what you see and hear around you – or for it to find its way into your writing anyway. Several times now, I’ve visited the island of Eynhallow, and the twelfth century ruins there, thought to have been a monastery. It made a strong impression on me so I wrote a poem. I wasn’t really writing about monks or about the chapel. It had much more to do with questioning why we visit such places, and, more widely, why some of us move from elsewhere to live on an island or in some “remote” place, as Orkney is so commonly perceived. But of course, using the name “Eynhallow” and mentioning “chapel” and “monks” inevitably leads to the idea that this poem is directly influenced by George Mackay Brown’s work. I’m not railing against this – I think I understand why it happens, and if “Incomers on Eynhallow” had been written by someone else and I were the reader I’m afraid I might have jumped to the same conclusion.

Here you are surrounded by the sea, the shores and cliffs, the fields and moorland and lochs. The extremes of weather and the changing light and seasons are all so immediately around you, affecting what you do and how you feel and how you see yourself and the wider world. And the place names, the dialect, the evidence of past lives, the old economies, the wartime remains, the Renaissance palaces, the Norse cathedral, the Neolithic sites, the evidence of the fragility and constant change in the place and so on – these are there all around you, you are aware of them and they are thought-provoking and inevitably stir the imagination in some way.

So I think there is an inevitability that writers in a place – any place, and whether born in it or incomer to it – will use images and ideas and have interests and concerns that are at times similar.
I think perhaps from the outside, beyond Orkney, because George Mackay Brown is such a well-known literary figure, and because his literary presentation of Orkney (even when, on some level, what he writes is not simply ‘about’ Orkney) has a particular power and comes to seem so familiar, it’s easy then to notice in other Orkney writers images and concerns (with time, for example, or with change – and I think we’re all, in some way, and inevitably, concerned with these things) and conclude that similarities or echoes are to do with his literary influence. As of course they might be. But it’s just as possible that they are not.
Although we might each have our own questions about our identity in relation to the place in which we live, and although we are all in our different ways very involved in the culture of the place, I think we may have less concern with marginalisation or with actively or consciously shaping or asserting a literary identity for Orkney than the writers of a generation ago or more.

While George Mackay Brown’s work expresses at times a deep anxiety about that change and its homogenising effects on people, and a loss of connection with the natural world and erosion of the values of community, I think other writers embrace it and see in it continuity and potential rather than disjunction or dissolution. For example, Alistair Peebles in “Heather Linties, Hundreds” in Turning Place:
ontheonehand, ontheother
this ring of stones
those turning blades . . .

the beach half-white,
criss-crossed with footprints.

Yvonne Gray27 Oct 2013
I think George Mackay Brown’s insistence on the work of the poet as a craft – a job, like others, to be worked at with skills and tools that are practised and become honed – is salutary. I think it is both affirming and prompts questioning of what one does as a writer – both needful.

You were talking about those images in the first stanza and, because you focused on the idea that here the poet is being presented as crafting some thing, it really drew my attention to the continuity of this particular strand of thought that is presented more explicitly elsewhere in his work – in ‘A Work for Poets’, which you’ve already mentioned, and in some of the ‘Under Brinkie’s Brae’ columns as well as in interview. The images of language ‘unstable as sand’ and the process of making a poem as striking ‘hard rock’ (those words ‘strike’ and ‘carving’ suggesting the challenge, the difficulty of the work to be done) had a very particular resonance for me because they dramatise the process of getting to the core of what you are trying to write about, getting at the truth of it, and the way it feels to be doing that. How often do you put down your pen thinking you have at last ‘caught’ the idea, the feeling, the sense of what it is you need to set down – then when you read it the next day or after a longer space you think, no, that’s not it at all? It’s hard to avoid the easy, the hackneyed, the vapid, and the lure of the beautiful or striking image which, when you come to really think about it, is just floating on the surface or is itself just surface.

I agree with your idea that to ‘strike on hard rock’ suggests recording, celebrating, giving a sort of permanence to our lives, ourselves, our experiences, things of value or concern – whatever may be encompassed by that phrase, ‘breath’s sweet brevity’. There’s an echo from ‘Hamnavoe’ too in the desire to hoard images, not only of a time, but of values which are perhaps passing. (Morag MacInnes’s poems in Street Shapes, though very different, also arise at least partly, I think, from an acute awareness of change and the feeling that it’s important to record her impressions of the Stromness she grew up in before the impressions are overwritten and lost.) Returning, though, to the image of striking on ‘hard rock’, it brings back to me the story of Moses in the desert (sand again, arid and shifting) bringing forth water from the rock, satisfying on a literal level the physical need of his people and on an allegorical level their spiritual need. If it’s relevant to read them in that way, these further layers underline what already seems like a profound importance – and great responsibility – in the work of the poet.

And then there’s what it is that the poet symbolically sets in the rock – ‘runes’, ‘hieroglyphs’, ‘marks’. This seems to suggest the continuity or constancy of the role of the poet through time – the connectedness of the poet of 2093 with the one in 1993, or the Norse rune maker a thousand or more years ago, or the ancient Egyptian scribe or stone carver five thousand years ago. Through the ages, the poet is just one of the maskers in ‘different motley’ making marks, hieroglyphs, runes or writing as befits his or her time; taking part in a “masque” that is nevertheless in its basic moves or imperatives, ‘unchanging’. As well as creating this connecting thread of what poets do and the sense of permanence in the marks on stone, the choice of [the] words ‘runes’ or ‘hieroglyphs’ seems to acknowledge them as hard to read, capable of multiple interpretations. It’s as if the reading of them is as hard as the making of them; ‘language as unstable as sand’ [being] as true for the reader as for the writer. You said how this poem, for you, demonstrates George Mackay Brown’s “unique poetic vision” and I agree – I think the apparently simple language slowly and quietly yields up a very rich hoard.